Bye.

Awesome. Thank you a lot.

OK. I’m not entirely sure if this will be online or in the printed magazine. Does that matter for you how fast it will be or is it…?

OK. Thank you a lot. With the transcript, we will do as we said. I think you’ll send me a link or something.

That’s some pretty full day, I’d say. Is every day of yours like this?

Yeah.

How was your day?

My last question for you: How will the rest of your day today look like?

Hong Kong has been a lot in the news recently, and I guess it’s also a topic in Taiwan. Is the battle for Hong Kong also a digital battle?

Then you have a tech divide, and then also next to the tech divide, you have the Chinese firewall. Then you have a divide going through different industries, and sectors of technologies. That’s what I meant or what I thought people mean when they talk about a new Iron Curtain ...

I think it gets clearest between China and US. When the US says, OK, a US company shall not buy these components of Chinese companies, and then Chinese companies boycott American companies on the other side.

Have you ever heard the term digital Iron Curtain? Is it something that you see on the horizon coming up? What’s your take on this?

I’m not sure how the topic is talked about in Taiwan. In Germany, the mood is this: You see how China is getting ever more powerful in the digital space, be it with new social networks like TikTok, be it with prevailing in telecommunications industry or semiconductor industry. People getting ...

Is the China topic a topic that you would deal with in terms of digital power? Is that something you’d leave to the defense ministry people who wouldn’t show up to your meetings?

I was just wondering, you wouldn’t think that any of those systems will evolutionarily, naturally prevail and be the model that more and more countries adopt? You know what I mean? That other countries would see “OK, maybe we need to digitalize a bit more,” and then they look around ...

Whereas Estonia digitalizes traditional political systems and you have your new approach with Polis, China seemed to go in a complete different way with also a very digital state. Do you think the more liberal versions of digitalization of politics are going to prevail naturally? What’s your take on that?

Let me just look at my questions. I also wanted to talk with you about China, because now when we talk about Estonia, it’s like there’s different models on how digitalization can shape a country.

Are you in contact with people from Estonia about this? They tend to be the most digital country.

How do you think is politics, apart from Taiwan, going to look in 10 or 15 years? Do you think those ideas that you just developed in Taiwan, they have the potential to also change politics in other places or?

We had similar ideas in Germany a few years back. There were the Pirate Party. They came up with a system called Liquid Democracy. It failed spectacularly. Why did it work in Taiwan? Why did it fail in Europe?

Does a country need a crisis to implement a system like this, or would that also, in your opinion, work without a defining crisis first?

It actually could free up a lot of energy that is now used for battling each other from the trenches of party politics.

If politicians are now more facilitators, they also could be just desk officers, but they wouldn’t need to have necessarily a party association, do rallies, and all this kind of things.

That sounds pretty interesting, actually. [laughs] Wouldn’t that make traditional political parties somewhat unnecessary?

Yeah.

The Polis system that you just described, it sounds a bit more different than having representatives who press through a topic and more like a politician becomes more a person that organizes different opinions to fit together.

OK. In a wider circle, I mean. Doesn’t that also change the idea of politics? Now, for example, in Germany it’s a way you vote for a politician. The politician has quite a strong opinion on some case, be it let’s say, gay marriage. That’s what you vote him or ...

Let’s say this method becomes mainstream, what would that do…?

Where did the idea come from to use this specific tool that you found in, I guess, Seattle?

Do you think that could work in big states as well or would that be too complicated?

The idea would then be to go more into detail and leave the big binary question out for a while.

Let’s say if you take any bigger state that is very divided at the moment, for example, UK. You have the one part of the people who feels like they really want to leave the European Union. Then the other part really believes that should not happen, for example. Would ...

You have written in, for example, “The New York Times” about the digital decision-making platform, Polis, and how it works. I won’t go into detail here because you already detailed it. What are the limits to that system?

It’s not so much a competition between ministries but more of a consultancy for other ministries in a way.

There is a reason.

How is the process in your ministry now faster – it sounds, at least, faster – than it usually would be in other ministries? Can you compare that?

That sounds pretty interesting. What was the outcome of this process that you are so far most proud of?

How to free up the innovation in public sector?

You went from hacker to Apple consultant to minister. What surprised you the most on that journey?

I sent you some of the questions beforehand. I think I will start with them, and then we see where we go from there.

It’s just surprising to see that a minister actually can be so open and can have an office without closed doors and guards outside or anything.

Were there, at any time, any bad experiences with this openness? Anybody tried to harass you or any of these things, or was it always easy?

Where are you sitting now? What’s the background?

Awesome. That’s perfect. Cool. Should we start right away or?